Distant Worlds is a p. impressive-looking space 4x game of truly epic proportions. I've just completed the tutorial, so I'm still a noob at this game, but it looks awesome and I feel like doing an LP of it.
Now, because I'm still a noob and learning to play, we're not going to make the galaxy too big. Actually, even a "Dwarf" map is rather large compared to other games (GalCiv2, MoO2, that Civ4 space mod), so that's going to be enough for us.
We'll make ourselves an expanding galaxy, which means that other empires will be moderately advanced. We'll also have plentiful alien life forms cause independent pre-space-empire cultures can be useful to trade with, or colonize their planets and assimilate their people into our culture.
We'll also have fast research speed and a normal amount of pirates and space creatures (they're like the space eels and amoebae of MoO2).
Now, on to the creation of our mighty empire!
Now, for races there's a large selection, but because I'm a racist there are only about three races that interest me: humans (that's us), Kiadian (humans with huge brains, think Psilons only that they're humanoid) and Securan. We're gonna take Securans because they're hot space chicks who love culture and food. Also because they have tits.
Now, there are some more starting options to pick. The name of our Empire shall be Codexia and I've chosen the flag that looks most like a swastika. I've also colored it like the Third Reich flag. Our galaxy starting location can be either the inner core, outer core, inner rim or outer rim. I've picked the outer core, which is pretty central and has a good amount of star systems around it. The red circle on the map shows the area where your solar system might be located.
We can also choose how far our empire is developed, both in size and technology. I've chosen a small Empire consisting of one planet for our Codexia, so we can start from the beginning and grow more and more powerful as we colonize new worlds. I'll give us a little head-start in technology, though, and set it to advanced. I'll also make our star system be totally awesome.
Now, on to the other Empires!
I won't provide a screenshot here cause there's not much to see. You can create other empires just like we've just created our own Codexia, picking their race, technological advancement and government type, but we'll just let the computer randomly generate some Empires. Since this is a small map, I've chosen to have 7 Empires competing with me. I've also checked "allow independent alien colonies to form new empires", which probably means that the pre-imperial aliens we can find on some planets have the chance to found their own empires later on. Neat!
Now on to victory conditions. I think they're pretty straightforward and don't need much explaining, so I'll just provide a screenshot:
Basically, we'll win if we own 40% of all colonies, or if 40% of the galaxy's population lives in our Empire. These goals sound like they're doable, but not too easy to attain.
That's it, now we're going to finally start the game and create a Galaxy for us to colonize with sexy blue alien chicks! Creating the galaxy takes a while because it's large (yeah, even though we picked the smallest available map size). After a while, the game starts and we see this screen:
Behold our mighty and powerful Empire of Codexia! It has... uhm, yeah, one planet. But that's okay because we want to start from the beginning, anyways. Building an Empire from the ground up is more fun than starting out huge already, in my opinion. But before we start building our Empire, let's take a look at the galaxy map:
Every dot on that map is a star system, except for the pink ones. They're nebulas. The star with the red circle around it is our home system. The one with a blue circle around it belongs to another Empire (as you explore the galaxy, you will find other Empires - this one is close enough to us so we already know about them from the start).
Now, looking at this, it's really kinda small, so we'll scrap that game and start over on a slightly larger map. This time, I'll pick a "Small" map with 400 stars (four times the amount that we have now) to make the whole affair a bit more exciting. But don't worry, we won't have to create our Empire from scratch again - the game remembers the options of your previous game and leaves the options sliders at the places you set them last time. So we'll just increase map size a little and maybe add one more Empire, so we'll have 8 other empires to trade and wage war with.
Doesn't that look much better? It sure does!
That's it for now, dear citizens of Codexia!
In our next update, we'll check out our solar system, try to mine for resources on different planets and try building a colony ship and colonizing another planet in our own solar system.
